100
2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
In this brutal, beautiful, and necessary novel, David Joy stares down his literary forebears – writers like Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, and Joy’s former teacher, Ron Rash – who use lyricism and violence, not to set the other trait in relief, but instead as complements, ragged portions of a fallen, redeemable world. The Line That Held Us begins in the woods where two men are breaking the law, one poaching deer and the other poaching ginseng. Neither of these men ought to be on forbidden land, but both seem fated to be there. The man with the rifle, Darl Moody, mistakes Sissy Brewer – dressed in gray camo, hunched over a ginseng patch – for a pig and shoots. Thus begins the engrossing, often repulsive (how the bodily fluids flow!) story of Dwayne Brewer’s hyperviolent quest to enact revenge, not only on his brother’s killer, but also on Darl’s best friend and reluctant accomplice, Calvin Hooper, and Calvin’s girlfriend, Angie. (Although her role in The Line That Held Us takes a turn for the predictable when Dwayne kidnaps her, Angie is in fact the most ferociously resourceful of the novel’s “good” characters, ready to eliminate her captor with a Molotov cocktail when the opportunity arises.)
AT HOME IN THE VALLEY OF THE BUZZARDS a review by Jimmy Dean Smith David Joy. The Line That Held Us. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2018.
JIMMY DEAN SMITH is a Professor and former Chair of English at Union College in Barbourville, KY. He has recently published journal articles and book chapters on Ron Rash and Flannery O’Connor, among others, and edits the Kentucky Philological Review. Read his essay on Ron Rash in NCLR 2011.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ASHLEY T. EVANS
DAVID JOY was born in Charlotte, NC, and is the author of the novels Where All Light Tends to Go (Putnam, 2015; reviewed in NCLR Online 2016), and The Weight of This World (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2017), as well as the memoir Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman’s Journey (Bright Mountain Books, 2011), which was a finalist for the Reed Environmental Writing Award.
RIGHT David Joy speaking with his friend Roger Bigham in Jackson County, NC, 2017
One of the novel’s memorable characters is troubled by buzzards – naturally enough, since he keeps a dead body nearby. These scavengers also serve to remind us that a Euro-American mistranslation of one of the novel’s settings, Cullowhee, was “valley of the buzzards,” a bird well-suited to survival no matter how disgusting it is. Later in the novel, one character reflects on what has brought three people together in a tense and likely fatal confrontation: “What a strange, strange world, how a man ends up where he does. . . . Sometimes it’s his own doing, but most the time, most the time, it’s like we’re led along like starved dogs” (244). This person has lately begun thinking of himself as a prophet “sent to teach . . . something” (242) about giving up hope, about the wisdom of living like starved dogs and just going where grim circumstance leads. Earlier, another of those three had reflected that “it [is] impossible to forget even for a moment how quickly the hammer could come down” (148). Now, with a rifle’s muzzle mere feet from this man’s head, the tough-guy metaphor has become excruciatingly literal: he “closed his eyes [and] waited for the hammer to fall” (247). In the second chapter of the novel, Joy